Unified IT Monitoring: A Necessity in the Era of the Customer

The New Customer Today’s customer and employee profiles look very different than they did just a few years ago. These tech-enabled, highly connected buyers are using many different platforms to research, shop and work. They’re engaging brands in new ways—through social networks, as well as mobile and cloud-based applications. And with all their newfound capabilities, they’re expecting more from their business interactions.

To meet the expectations of these empowered digital end users, many businesses are: • Adopting new applications and processes• Investing in technology-based innovation• Creating differentiated customer experiences

And, they are getting a leg up on the competition.

Succeeding in a Customer-powered RealityAccording to Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CXi) research, “Customer experience leaders had a cumulative 22.5 percent gain in performance over the past years, compared with a 46.3 percent decrease for a portfolio of customer experience laggards.”1

021 Left-Shift Technology Monitoring For Success in the Age Of the Customer. Forrester Research, Inc. February 14, 2014.

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Leader or a Laggard?If you’re not yet a leader, your current IT monitoring tools could be to blame. That’s because as you introduce new technology services that meet internal workforce and external customer requirements, you slowly, but surely, create a massively complex IT environment where mobile applications, cloud services and dynamic virtualized tools converge with legacy, on-premise systems.

Consider the following use case:Margaret, a VP of IT Operations for a multinational corporation and her team of administrators have evolved their company’s infrastructure to keep pace with advancements in technology and lines of business needs. Over time, they added multiple point solutions and open source tools across organizational silos to help monitor the health and status of each component. But, these tools inevitably caused more operational headaches than they solved.

The result was a confusing mix of disjointed monitoring tools used in operational silos that negatively impacted performance, availability, service delivery and the overall customer experience. Margaret and her team faced the following three challenges.

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Does Margaret’s story sound familiar? Continue reading to see how her current IT monitoring tools are failing to meet expectation.

A Case in PointMargaret and her team are responsible for providing timely support for new enterprise applications and technologies to improve employee productivity and enhance the customer buying experience. When an outage occurs, her IT team wastes precious time finding and fixing the problem across domains and cross-functional teams using multiple outdated and ineffective IT monitoring tools. The resulting downtime means that employees aren’t working and customers aren’t buying. Moreover, when her IT administrators are fighting daily fires, they are unable to devote enough time to the innovative projects that deliver real business value.

1. Too Much Time is Spent Fighting Fires

2-3 Pulse Report by Gatepoint Research: Strategies for Monitoring IT Infrastructure and Service, May 2014

47% of organizations use more than five tools to monitor their IT infrastructure.2

Jumping from tool to tool and a siloed monitoring approach are top challenges for organizations using more than five tools.3 +

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When an issue occurs, who’s to blame? Like Margaret, you may not be able to identify the culprit until it’s too late.

A Case in PointMargaret’s team of IT administrators all use separate “best-of-breed” point monitoring tools that make it nearly impossible to pinpoint the root cause of failures. At the onset of an issue, her administrators check their own siloed views of the disparate systems and accuse one another of letting system errors fall through the cracks. This delays issue resolution, degrades the user experience and leaves customers dissatisfied. Plus, the constant finger pointing can create more friction among an already divided staff.

2. Customer Experience Suffers While Fingers are Pointed

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The slower you are to respond, the faster your competitors will pass you by. Margaret knows this all too well.

A Case in PointThe IT tools Margaret’s team employs are difficult to use, too complex to customize and limited in scope and scale. And as her administrators try to monitor the performance and availability of the IT infrastructure under their respective domains and departments, the overall operational efficiency of IT is reduced. Since so much time is spent managing disparate tools and decentralized views of the IT infrastructure, little is left for customer-centric innovation. While Margaret’s team struggles with increasing complexity and loses strategic focus, her competitors develop and roll out the “next best” application, seizing market share and leaving Margaret’s company in the dust.

3. Competitors are Flying By

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Graduate from Laggard to LeaderSave your team from the constant firefighting and finger pointing and put an end to the poor customer experience that results from ineffective, disjointed monitoring tools. CA Nimsoft Monitor is designed to help you deliver an optimal customer experience by monitoring the availability and performance of all your services, applications and technologies—both inside and outside your data center—via a single, unified and comprehensive IT monitoring solution.

The Operations view contains IT/business service health and SLA performance.

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Shift Resources from Reactive Work to Revenue Generation

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Staying on top of all the new applications and technologies that your customers demand is difficult enough. Don’t make it harder by settling for IT monitoring tools that are difficult to use, too complex to customize and limited in both scope and scale.

CA Nimsoft Monitor increases operational efficiency by delivering agility, power and simplicity, enabling you to

spend less time supporting your management tools and more time addressing the growing needs of the business.

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Start Putting Your Customers First

With CA Nimsoft Monitor’s unified architecture and comprehensive monitoring coverage, you will finally be positioned to monitor, measure and report on the metrics that matter most to your customers. You’ll be able to adopt and manage new customer-centric applications and technologies more quickly.

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Provide a Single, Unified Monitoring PlatformKey features of CA Nimsoft Monitor include:• Unified platform with comprehensive coverage: Provides scalable, resilient and reliable IT monitoring

support for more than 140 technologies across your data center and the cloud.• Unified trending and root cause analysis: Helps you identify and correct problems across your entire

IT infrastructure before they impact business performance.

4 IDC White Paper, sponsored by CA Technologies, Unified Infrastructure Monitoring and Management Increases Availability, MTTR, and IT Staff Productivity, October, 2013..

5 Data collected from benchmark data study conducted by CA Technologies in 2012. Actual results may vary.

Up to 20%25%CA Nimsoft Monitor:

increases productivity of end users through better infrastructure

availability5

CA Nimsoft Monitor:improves mean time to

repair (MTTR)4

20%CA Nimsoft Monitor:

reduces system and network outages4

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Free IT for Higher Value ProjectsKey features of CA Nimsoft Monitor include:

• Power and simplicity: Designed to provide the ease of use associated with point solutions, featuring a powerful architecture that has a lightweight footprint.

• Unified user experience and control: Helps eliminate the need to purchase, install, maintain, deploy, update and train for multiple tools.

• Intuitive, sophisticated visualization, alarms and reporting: Helps boost service levels by accelerating problem resolution, proactively preventing issues and prioritizing IT support efforts according to business process value.

The less time spent managing monitoring tools means more time can be devoted to strategic business initiatives that move the company forward.

CA Nimsoft Monitor:improves IT staff productivity6

Simple dashboard that displays the overall status of each business service, customer or application.

The Operations View contains IT/business service health and SLA performance.

6 IDC. Unified Infrastructure Monitoring and Management Increases Availability, MTTR, and IT Staff Productivity (Sponsored by CA Technologies). Mary Johnston Turner. October, 2013.

Up to 25%

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Focus on the Customer Experience Key features of CA Nimsoft Monitor include:• Plug-and-Play architecture: Provides for the rapid, on-demand addition

of new monitoring capabilities without having to disrupt your existing environment with additional products or bolt-on workarounds.

• Business- and customer-centric monitoring: Supports the aggregation of monitoring data from disparate IT sources, but also offers powerful APIs and SDKs that pull customer service data into custom dashboards for a complete picture of a customer’s experience.

This E-Commerce Service View helps to ensure a positive customer experience.

About the Solution from CA Technologies CA Nimsoft Monitor delivers the essential capabilities needed to help you proactively monitor and manage alarms, performance and SLAs across even the most dynamic and complex environments. Instead of having to deploy multiple point solutions, you can leverage CA Nimsoft Monitor and get a single platform to manage your IT infrastructure and services—whether they’re on premise or in the cloud. Built for both service providers and enterprise customers, CA Nimsoft was designed as a platform that provides scalable, resilient and reliable IT monitoring across all your critical IT resources.

With CA Nimsoft Monitor, your business can more easily:

• Realize fast time to value and optimal efficiency, with streamlined deployment, ease of use, unified administration and more.

• Leverage a single platform with an extensible architecture that can help you monitor every device and service that matters to your business.

• Harness intuitive, sophisticated visualization and reporting that helps boost service levels through accelerated problem resolution—and proactive issue prevention.

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CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments—from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. CA Technologies’ innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organizations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 relies on CA Technologies to manage evolving IT ecosystems.

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